Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Isaiah chapter 15 - Ezra

There is really no reason for any chapter in Isaiah to have the same number of verses as its corresponding book has chapters, but I usually look for that anyway, just because the idea of this study is based in the numerical comparison of the chapters of Isaiah and the books of the Bible, each one containing sixty-six component units.

A quick look let me know that while the book of Ezra has ten chapters, its corresponding chapter of Isaiah (15th chapter) has only nine verses. While I was looking at the numbers and before I actually started to read the words of Ezra, I compared the book of Nehemiah with its thirteen chapters to the sixteenth chapter of Isaiah and found that chapter to be divided into fourteen verses. So, I didn’t find a match there, but I did notice that the total number of chapters in Ezra and Nehemiah was twenty-three and the total number of verses in Isaiah chapter fifteen and sixteen was also twenty-three, but what could that mean?

So, I took a cursory look at Ezra and found that it was a prophecy concerning the nation of Moab. I didn’t see anything else there, so I moved on to Nehemiah, only to find that it too was about Moab. Both books were about Moab, but the principle character in Ezra was, of course, Ezra, and the principle character in Nehemiah was, you guessed it, Nehemiah. Other than their principle characters, both books were about God’s judgment of the land of Moab.

Well, that was sort of a link, so I took a look at the information at the beginning of Ezra that had been written and placed therein by a writer from the 20th century. It started out by stating that the books of Ezra and Nehemiah had originally been part of the same book called Ezra, but that the original book had been divided into two books and the second part had been renamed for the principle character, Nehemiah. BINGO!

The original book of Ezra contained all of the material from the two books we now call Ezra and Nehemiah. That means that the total verses in that original book would have been twenty-three, and that’s the same as the number as the number of chapters in Isaiah chapters fifteen and sixteen. That’s a nifty numerical alignment, but was that to be the only correlation that the Holy Spirit created between the two books and the two chapters when He inspired the writers to pen the words in them? Probably not. I began my search for more of a link, and I wondered if there was a connection between the words in Isaiah chapter fifteen and the words of the book of Ezra. What did I find?

I found about seven words or word pairs that I thought were significant and/or unique within the text of Ezra. This is a quick list:

laid waste my heart
destruction desolate
carry away brook
laid up.

There were actually a lot of other words, words that were more than just prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions and the like, but the above list shows the words that are found in the book of Ezra as well as the 15th chapter of Isaiah.

My first impression was that this list actually paints a picture of Jerusalem in Ezra’s day, so, I was hopeful of there being something more definitive of a direct link. When I did a computerized word search for these words, I found that this group of words does not appear in any other chapter of the Bible. Let me say that again. This list of words does not appear in any other chapter of the Bible. Is that just a coincidence?

Then, looking at the list, I realized that it was quite a big list of words (seven words or word pairs), and I thought perhaps that was why only one Bible chapter had them all, so, I reduced the number of words in my search to the two word pairs, ‘laid up’ and ‘carry away’. No other chapter in the Bible contains these two pairs of words. They are both found only in the book of Ezra and again in the fifteenth chapter of Isaiah.

In combination with the fact that not one, but two additional word pairs from the book of Ezra are found in Isaiah chapter fifteen this is even more significant. But, trying to be completely objective about it, I ran a search for ‘desolate’, ‘brook’ and ‘destruction’. No other chapter of the Bible contains these three words. Only Isaiah chapter fifteen has them. With that, I turned my attention to the book of Nehemiah.

This is the fifteenth chapter of Isaiah, and Ezra is the fifteenth book in the Bible. They are connected.

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